Two Raleigh waste-facility fires send smoke across Wake County

Smoke from two waste-facility fires spread across Raleigh overnight and into Garner, sending firefighters to opposite sides of the city and forcing a road closure near Garner Road, Hammond Road and I-40. Drivers also kept calling about heavy smoke over the interstate as crews worked to keep the flames contained and protect nearby roads and properties.

The first fire started as a mulch fire at Liberty Waste Solutions on Gresham Lake Road in North Raleigh on Friday afternoon. Fire officials said a hot spot reignited around 8:30 p.m. Friday, pulling crews back to the landfill after the earlier flare-up. North Carolina Forestry Service crews helped contain that fire Saturday morning as firefighters continued working the site for hours.

The second blaze broke out around 1:45 a.m. at the Foss Recycling plant on Garner Road in south Raleigh. A CBS 17 photojournalist saw the facility fully engulfed just after 2 a.m., and the fire was still burning eight hours later. To keep the response safer, firefighters laid extra water supply lines across the roadway, which forced the closure near Hammond Road and I-40 and slowed traffic around one of the county’s busiest corridors.

By early afternoon on May 2, both fires were essentially out, and no injuries were reported at either site. That was the best possible outcome in a night when smoke was visible far beyond the facilities themselves and emergency crews had to spend hours keeping the fires from spreading.

The twin fires also highlighted how difficult waste and recycling blazes can be to control once they take hold. Raleigh’s Yard Waste Center processes yard debris into mulch and compost, and mulch fires can burn deep and restart after appearing under control. The Raleigh Fire Department, which says its more than 600 firefighters answer about 50,000 calls for service every year, was forced to split attention between two separate industrial fire scenes on the same night.

The timing raised fresh concern because North Raleigh has seen similar problems before. Prior reporting on a landfill fire noted several fires in the mulch yard over the previous year, and an earlier Raleigh mulch-processor fire burned for days before it was fully extinguished. For Wake County residents, the immediate impact Saturday was smoke, disrupted traffic and a reminder that a single rekindled hot spot can quickly become a countywide public-safety problem.